Brookfield draws on his personal experiences with the Critical Incident Questionnaire (CIQ), a weekly evaluation that prompts students to provide specific details about personally significant classroom occurrences. Brookfield argues the CIQ has several advantages as a diagnostic tool for teaching and learning: it gives the instructor a running commentary of students feedback about classroom instruction, encourages students to reflect on class activities, and provides a forum for discussing classroom miscommunications or points of confusion. In advocating the use of CIQs in the classroom, Brookfield cites advantages such as increasing student and teacher awareness of problems before disaster develops, encouraging reflective learning, and building the case for diversity in teaching.
Collaborative writing has many benefits and also some problems. Students may dislike the process, have disagreements, and produce "bland" writing that reaches the "lowest-common denominator" or "silences weaker, minority, or marginal voices" (373). Elbow proposes collage to make collaborative writing easier, more inviting, and richer in thinking. Elbow provides three additional methods for helping students collaborate: (1) sharing drafts and incorporating passages from each other; (2) including extended quotations from readings or interviews to help students position themselves in authoritative dialogue with others; and (3) writing dialogue by passing papers back and forth and collaborating to create a coherent dialogue. Collaborative collage can bridge back to solo writing that considers conflicting ideas, multiple points of view, tension, and complexity of structure and that gives voice to multiple, internal views.
El-Hindi analyzes the effects of introducing metacognative awareness strategies through reading logs to a group of thirty-four high school graduates that were participating in a six-week summer reading and writing program before their matriculation as freshmen. Students learned strategies that corresponded to the planning, drafting, and responding stages of reading and writing; responded to questionnaires about their own reading and writing skills; and produced reading logs on their reading, understanding, and analysis of class texts. El-Hindi concludes that metacognative awareness should aid developmental writers by giving them the skills necessary to analyze and synthesize readings. She also finds that activities asking students to become more aware of their active participation in an assigned task should lead students to be better readers and writers.
Emig argues that there is a significant difference between speaking and writing. Combining writing and speaking can help develop higher cognitive functions such as analysis and synthesis. Writing requires that we employ learning by doing, learning by depiction in an image, and learning by reinstatement in words. Writing also requires establishing connections and conceptual relationships.
Incorporating journal writing into a course's curriculum can be beneficial for students at risk of dropping out of their college writing courses and, subsequently, out of college. Sixteen essays provide examples of and reflection on integration of journal writing into writing courses. Essays focus on subjects such as how and why journals were effective and which innovative ways of envisioning and using journals were effective with diverse student populations. The volume also includes an essay on why one author stopped using journals and an essay on issues connected to assessing journals.
Wanting his assignments to be informed by real-world relevance, Shafer had his students write personal letters to anyone of their own choosing. Shafer participated in the assignment by sharing a letter he wrote to his recently deceased father and came to understand the anxieties that students feel when sharing their writing with others. As an audience, his students broke free of their normal error seeking, evaluated his letter's essence, and revised instead of edited. The next class meeting demonstrated that students themselves were becoming writers. Many arrived in class with letters that had been revised multiple times. Letter writing, Shafer argues, paired with a writing or literacy club, is "invaluable not only for its short, holistic character but also for the many political and liberating opportunities it offers" (53).
VonBergen argues that expressivism does not belong in the basic writing classroom because students have not internalized a sufficient array of narrative models and are likely to produce expressive essays that are heavy on extraneous detail and light on main point. Drawing on David Bartholomae's "Inventing the University," she claims that allowing students to write without making a point is a disservice and that instructors should help students to imitate and appropriate the forms of academic discourse. To that end, VonBergen suggests using poetry to provide students with a model on which to base their essays. Key for VonBergen is that the discursive aims of this assignment are not expressive (emotional) but referential (referring to a concrete reality). She provides a sample assignment that uses Countee Cullens poem "Incident" as a model for a personal essay. The three stanzas of the poem, she says, are models for three parts of an essay: the context for the incident, the events that happened, and the author's reactions to those events. Using this model, she contends, students are much less likely to produce personal essays in which no point is made or in which a point is made but only incidentally.
See: David Bartholomae, "Inventing the University" [2].